About Me

Monday, 26 April 2010

What is it?

This indoor plant flowered for me a few days ago. It has strap like leaves and the flower lasts for only one day. As it has only three petals I wonder if it is a member of the trillium family. I also wonder if I can keep it alive for a whole year and hopefully have more flowers next year.

I thought you might like to see a photo of my strawberry patch!! There is another pot with three more plants in it so we should have two helpings. Those strange furry things are pussy willow catkins - they are all over our garden and rain down on us from the tree just the other side of our wall. In places they look like a new kind of garden mulch.

This is the veg patch, though it will get larger when the dwarf french beans and runner beans are ready to plant out. I have to be careful to leave enough space on the patio to sit and enjoy the sun.

About a year ago this was a dark and dismal little area where nothing much would grow on account of our neighbours very high conifer hedge. The hedge height was drastically reduced, new fencing was put in place, I added more plants and already it is all paying off. Sunlight actually hits the ground here now and everything is growing nicely and beginning to fill out.

It's hard to imagine that only 6 or 7 weeks ago there was bare soil everywhere - if not snow! There has been such a surge of growth in the last two or three weeks and please note that I actually have one - albeit rather scrawny - black tulip this year. I had given up on them as they kept turning out a nasty faded mauve. You can almost see the plants growing and in the greenhouse all the seeds, apart from the sweet peppers, have germinated. All I have to do now is protect them from slugs and snails..

I haven't done much work on my textile projects and will have to pull my socks up. I have torn several strips of green cotton fabric ready to be pleated, appliqued, stitched and textured in as many different ways as I can think of. If I can make it work, they will be joined together somehow to become my interpretation of allotments as seen on Google Earth. I need one finished piece ready to be photographed by the second week in May so will have to get down to work.

7 comments:

It's a curious thing, but I think it's the second time today I've seen this flower! The first time I saw a photo of one growing wild, here: http://melialissa.blogspot.com/. It looks like a variety of iris and, indeed, http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/18378 calls it the Walking Iris. It is also known as the Apostle Plant or Neomarica gracilis.

What a fascinating flower - I should keep watching it because apparently the flowering stalk bends over and takes root. How clever!At first I thought it was a member of the orchid family - until you said it flowers for just one day. My orchid flowers last so long I get bored of them in the end!! :-)